FotB 07 Final Day - See you in September 2008

Last night's party went much better for me that the Casino thing. The music in the disco was a bit cheesy, but it's been a lot of fun to see John Davey, Brendan Dawes, Hoss Gifford (who looked a little like Dr. Evil) and others doing their thing on the dancefloor. And, like John Davey pointed out today - they had a GIRL IN A BOX! :)

I spent a lot of time drinking Gin and Tonic with Andrea and Dan - thank you for looking after me and for sharing the joke about the Yuguslavian with me ;-).

To my own surprise - a little tired but without major damage - I managed to arrive on time for today's first session. Again, I won't go into detail, but I attended Andy Polaine, Dr Woohoo, Andre Michelle, Marcos Weskamp (lately working for the Adobe XD team), the great impromptu session by Mario Klingemann, Aral Balkan (delivering the quickest demo of a flash-based data-driven web application - using SWX - I've ever seen) and Brendan Dawes and finally my personal highlight for today: Jared Tarbell. I have been in love with fractals since I had my first computer and even though I have seen a lot of great stuff in the last three days, his expriments are the ones that applied the most to my personal taste.

Flash on the Beach 2007 ended with a raffle where John Davey gave away a lot of great stuff by the speakers, the sponsors and himself - nice, even if I wasn't one of the lucky winners. He even shed a few tears when the speakers gave him a magnum bottle of champagne and a signed copy of the FotB artbook.

I hope everyone shares my opinion that this conference was a big success, the number and quality of great speakers surpassed last year. I wish I had been able to be at some of the sessions at the same time.
Location and venue: I have said it before and I'll say it again: I love Brighton.
I don't have the amount of experience with conferences, that some of the speakers and attendees have, but I think this is the friendliest conference I have ever been to. The same goes for the community: I met some people I already knew, got to know some others and I'm really looking forward to be here next year.
Taking with me a lot of inspiration, I hope I can at least put a glimpse of that into my own work. Anyway, I highly recommend this conference not only to designers, developers and people using Flash in general, but to anyone interested in rich media or interactive design - be it for professional or personal reasons.

Thank you, John Davey and everyone else who made this possible.

This may be my last post from Brighton, I'm leaving for Heathrow in the morning and then it's back to Munich.